San Francisco Forced To Shut Down BART Transit Stations After Homeless Leave Their Number 1’s And Number 2’s All Over The Place

Escalators are getting clogged in San Francisco’s transit system — and it’s something to hold your nose at.

People are actually treating the moving stairs as a toilet, leaving Bay Area Rapid Transit workers to discover so much human excrement at one broken Civic Center Station escalator last month that a haz-mat unit was summoned, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

Combatting human waste is one that BART officials and police recognize as more than a potty problem.

“Nobody wants to be walking in urine and feces, I know that, (but) if we don’t see it, or the person doesn’t admit to it, they can just say it was someone else,” BART police spokeswoman Officer Era Jenkins told The Chronicle. “Certain crimes you don’t see, you can’t enforce.”

Station surveillance cameras aren’t typically observed when the stations shut down for the night, she added.

Station stairwells become nighttime refuges for the homeless, who are likely relieving themselves when no one’s around.

But there’s a larger issue of homelessness that can be difficult to address — especially for a transit agency, the Chronicle said.

“As much as we like to have an oasis from the rest of the world, we don’t look at (these issues) in isolation, we look at (them) as part of a puzzle,” BART spokesman Jim Allison told the newspaper.

There were five escalators shutdown in the city’s downtown train system this week. While it’s unclear the exact causes, the late-night mucking up of the machinery is linked to a lack of public restrooms in the area, officials said.

Until something can be done, the system’s 105 million users will have to deal with the breakdowns.

Last month, BART officials said 28 of its 179 escalators were out of service — a record, ABC affiliate KGO-TV reported.

Officials are spending about $200,000 to rehab them, the station said.